Movies about male buddies (usually cops), are a dime a dozen,
and so are flicks about misfit teenagers. The Dangerous
Lives of Altar Boys is about two rowdy teens who are best
friends, but there is nothing cut-rate or formulaic about
these characters: Tim Sullivan (Kieran Culkin) and Francis
Doyle (Emile Hirsch) are as achingly real as 14-year-olds
on screen can possibly be. Together with a couple of other
pranksters at their Catholic school, they create a kinky comic
book based on superhero imaginings of themselves. Their arch
villain is Nunzilla, a motorcycle- riding monster inspired
by the school’s strict and intrusive headmistress, Sister
Assumpta (Jodie Foster). What the boys don’t realize is that
the Irish-born disciplinarian, who has a prosthetic leg, is
acting out of compassion: She fears for their safety as well
as their souls.

As the film makes lyrically clear, life can be a treacherous
proposition, even for youngsters in 1970s suburbia. Tim, whose
parents are divorcing, acts out; artistic Francis keeps things
in. They glorify the events of their lives in the comic book—actually
a battered notebook that bursts onscreen with blazing panache
(the animation is by Spawn’s Todd McFarlane). After
a trip to the local zoo, Tim devises their boldest prank yet:
to hijack a cougar and release it in the school office, giving
him the opportunity to reclaim an illustrated William Blake
book confiscated by Assumpta. Tim implements this ludicrous
scheme with energy and resourcefulness, but Francis loses
interest after falling head-over-heels for a demure classmate,
Margie Flynn (Jena Malone).

Margie, however, has a terrible secret, one that throws a
deeply troubling monkey wrench into Francis’ sexual awakening.
It also causes dissension between him and Tim, and the resulting
rift is portrayed with acute naturalism. Throughout, the adolescent
banter and horseplay between the boys is so exuberantly authentic,
it’s as if the script (by Jeff Stockwell) had been divinely
channeled, rather than adapted, from the novel by the late
Chris McFarlane. Culkin, who is perfectly cast even though
he’s 20 (and who proved in 1998’s The Mighty that he’s
a far greater talent than his older brother Macaulay) is emerging
as the most versatile actor of his generation. Tim may be
an incorrigible wiseass, but Culkin uses his wildly expressive
face to convey the pain behind his bravado. Smoldering TV
actor Hirsch is equally good as Francis; when he shyly tells
Margie “I think about you all the time,” his unself-consciousness
is piercing.

Although his finesse with young actors is commendable, director
Peter Care, an acclaimed music-video auteur, falls short with
the film’s escalating drama. His fluency with translating
the boys’ turbulence to animation becomes tongue-tied and
evasive when it comes to grappling with the script’s disturbing
romance. Nor does he make enough of its intriguing nuances:
When Francis sees a ghost in Margie’s bedroom, could it be
the school’s patron saint, Agatha, whose statue he helped
to kidnap? By the end, Francis’—and the film’s—reliance on
animated superheroics becomes an emotional cop out. The film
is most moving when it lets its altered boys be boys.

Royal
Pain

The
Lady and the DukeDirected
by Eric Rohmer

Eric Rohmer, whose films are usually filled with talk and
sexual tension, but little in the way of action, is not a
director one would normally look to for technological innovation.
The octogenarian film veteran adopts the latest in digital
technology, however, to imagine the 18th-century Paris of
the French Revolution. Rohmer tells the true story of the
relationship between an unabashedly royalist Englishwoman
and a prominent French Duke who supports political reform,
reveling in the irony of their respective beliefs.

Grace Elliott (Lucy Russell) may be English, but she is wholeheartedly
devoted to France and its monarchy. While most members of
the French nobility presented find some fault with Louis XVI,
she dotes on both the king and his queen, the roundly disliked
Marie Antoinette. Her former lover, the Duke of Orleans (Jean-Claude
Dreyfus), is the king’s cousin, but realizing that the old
order is doomed, he adopts a position favorable to revolution.

In keeping with director Rohmer’s storytelling style, much
of the film is talk. Since the sexual affair between the lady
and the duke is long over, the best talk is about politics.
In these verbal clashes, the strident, unbending Grace defends
the nobles against the mob, while the charming, wily Duke
is more pragmatic in his views and more diplomatic in his
language.

With respect to the film’s innovations, Rohmer commissioned
a series of paintings, fashioned after engravings of the period,
to use as the backdrops for outdoor scenes. Actors and architecture
are digitally placed against these paintings, to startling
effect.

This works well when the scene features only a few actors,
making the picture seem like an engraving come to life. It
is less convincing in the few, but significant, large crowd
scenes. In both cases, however, the current limitations of
digital-video technology are as distracting as ever. Transferred
to 35mm film, the image quality is soft, and abrupt camera
movements are visually jarring. Natural light looks false,
and fire looks dreadful. With the movie clocking in at two
hours and 10 minutes, the digital wizardry grows tiresome.

As does the lead character. While Grace’s refusal to bend
her principles is admirable, and her personal courage inspiring,
her lack of any cogent royalist rationale makes her arguments
repetitious and dull. The story is based on the memoirs of
the real Grace Elliott, and has the rambling structure of
a filmed diary. While the characters have some interest, and
the visual experiments some merit, it might have been better
for moviegoers if the lady and the duke had never met.

—Shawn
Stone

Made
for TV

Hey
Arnold!Directed
by Tuck Tucker

The alternative press and new urbanists should love Hey
Arnold! The story’s conflict centers around the efforts
of a multiethnic and motley assortment of neighbors, lead
by young Arnold (Spencer Klein) and his buddy Gerald (Jamil
Walker Smith), and their attempts to thwart a developer’s
plan to raze their rundown community to make way for a gentrified
supermall. This neighborhood isn’t anything we’re used to
seeing in kids’ flicks, which are usually populated by palatial,
well-furnished homes situated on densely verdant avenues:
Arnold and friends live in something more akin to the setting
of the old Bowery Boys movies, complete with that series’
intense sense of camaraderie among society’s less fortunate.
But that’s not all: In the climactic scene, when Arnold, Gerald
and tart-tongued Helga (Francesca Marie Smith) hurry to stop
the developer’s wrecking ball, they do so via public transportation.

Politics aside, Hey Arnold! plays as an extended edition
of the popular Nickelodeon series on which it is based. Arnold,
he of the football-shaped head, is an incurable optimist,
whereas Gerald is more of a cynic. Helga, typical of young
girls, hides her infatuation with Arnold by taunting him at
every opportunity. In the movie, these dynamics are merely
played out against a more topical backdrop, thereby making
it more suitable for Arnold neophytes. However, this device
also deprives Arnold fans of some of the series’ more endearing
features, namely, its quirky characters. It’s a shame that
moviegoers don’t get more of aspiring butcher Harold and his
family and rabbi, bad-luck-prone Eugene, Stinky, or even Helga’s
somnolent mother, Miriam. What little we do get could be confusing
for newbies, like when Helga’s dad Big Bob (Maurice LaMarche)
calls her Olga. Some reviewers have referred to this as sloppy
writing/editing, but Arnold aficionados know that Olga is
Helga’s “perfect older” sister, the apple of Big Bob’s eye.

The movie provides cute takes on All the President’s Men
and Godzilla, but it lacks a certain freshness. Even
cameo appearances by Christopher Lloyd as a creepy undertaker
and Jennifer Jason Leigh as a voluptuous arms dealer don’t
do much to breath more pizzazz into the proceedings. Recently,
another Nick series, Rocket Power, debuted The Rocket
Power Movie, but on a kid- oriented channel as sort of
a special movie of the week. Writers Craig Bartlett (the show’s
creator) and Steve Viksten should have considered this option
for Hey Arnold!, since it’s doubtful that it will win
new viewers; and even regulars who no doubt will support Arnold
at the local Cineplex would certainly prefer the flavor of
the original.